Electronic devices, such as mobile phones and personal digital assistants (PDA's), often contain firmware and application software that are either provided by the manufacturers of the electronic devices, by telecommunication carriers, or by third parties. This firmware and application software often contain software bugs. New versions of the firmware and software are periodically released to fix the bugs or to introduce new features, or both. Often, a device management (DM) server facilitates bug-fixing operations. Frequently, it is unclear who should pay for the ensuing data traffic. It is also usually not clear how a carrier network can support different billing models when it comes to data traffic due to device management activities.
Problems often arise while conducting updates of firmware/software in such electronic devices, problems such as, for example, managing the millions of devices that require firmware upgrades and provisioning of applications. Sometimes there can be problems in providing flexible billing services for the electronic devices. Mainly, there are problems associated with determining how and which of the various DM activities should be charged.
Typically, several carrier networks, each with its own billing server have to be modified to work with third party entities that will be billed for services rendered to mobile subscribers. Often, it is not clear how these billing servers need to be modified to accommodate the differences.
Further limitations and disadvantages of conventional and traditional approaches will become apparent to one of ordinary skill in the art through comparison of such systems with the present invention.